beyond fair trade.

When I founded Think Coffee in 2006, I set out to understand for myself what it took to build a responsible coffee supply chain. Back then, Fair Trade looked like the best way to make that happen. Think Coffee's first tagline was even:

“Think Fair Trade. Think Organic. Think Shade Grown.”

But nearly twenty years and dozens of trips to coffee farms later, we’ve seen the limits of that model firsthand.

Fair Trade helped push the industry toward transparency, but for me, it didn't go far enough. Let's take a look at how coffee is purchased under a Fair Trade model to understand why.

What Is A Coffee Cooperative? 

Coffee is grown, harvested, and readied for export under a variety of structures. The Fair Trade label only applies to coffee that is grown under a cooperative structure. A coffee cooperative (co-op) is an organization formed by smallholder coffee farmers (typically anywhere from a few dozen to several thousand farmers) who join together to collectively process, market, and sell their coffee.

The basic idea: strength in numbers.

Individual small farmers often lack the scale or leverage to negotiate good prices with exporters or roasters. By pooling their coffee and acting as a single seller, they might be able to reach bigger buyers and gain access to credit, training, and sometimes certification programs like Fair Trade or Organic.

What Fair Trade Promises

Fair Trade coffee certification sets a minimum price that must be paid to cooperatives:

- $1.80 per pound of coffee, plus

- $0.20 per pound for community projects.

That might sound fair on paper. The problem is what happens next. 

Fair Trade only verifies what the price the cooperative receives, not what individual farmers are actually paid once the money is distributed.

The Hidden Gap

In practice, many smallholder farmers earn far less than the cooperative’s stated price. Once transportation, processing, and administrative fees are deducted, the farmgate price–the amount a farmer takes home–can drop 20–40% below the Fair Trade certified price.

Fair Trade doesn’t track how much money smallholder farmers actually receive. That means there’s no guarantee those payments are enough to both cover their expenses operating the farm and support a livable wage after those expenses are paid.

The result: a system that looks good from afar but often leaves the people who do the hardest work struggling to get by.

Fair Trade succeeds in two ways that matter to companies: it scales easily and it sells well. It offers a recognizable label that signals virtue to consumers.

But if that label doesn’t reflect what farmers actually earn, its meaning becomes mostly symbolic. Fair Trade offers efficiency for companies and reassurance for consumers, but little certainty for the farmers it was meant to protect.

Going Further

At Think Coffee, we believe fairness can’t be outsourced to a certification. It has to be proven through relationships, transparency, and accountability.

Our El Paramo and Kellensoo coffees are purchased from coffee cooperatives. We publish the farmgate prices for each of these coffees in our Fair And Livable Wage reports. We confirm that the farmers and workers behind these coffees earn living wages as defined in their own regions. And we invest directly in projects farmers identify as priorities—whether that’s housing, healthcare, or education.

This model takes more work, but it delivers something real: traceable, measurable impact on the lives of the people who grow our coffee.

Fair Trade was a meaningful first step. It raised awareness and created momentum. But the future of responsible coffee lies beyond the label—where fairness isn’t assumed, it’s verified.